


to kiss the bottom half of her face

by blackwood (transjon)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Guilt, Mental Health Issues, Sharing a Bed, Suicidal Thoughts, it's complicated - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27386962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transjon/pseuds/blackwood
Summary: “Your hair’s gotten so long,” she tells him next. One hand reaches towards him so he leans his head to meet it halfway. Fingernails scratch over the skin of his scalp. “Do you not get hot?”Jon bites down on his tongue so he doesn’t tell her he doesn’t think it’s the heat that’s the issue with long hair for her. “No,” he says.
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 9
Kudos: 66





	to kiss the bottom half of her face

**Author's Note:**

  * For [procrastinatingbookworm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/gifts).



> titles from rhode island by the front bottoms
> 
> theres a list of cws in the end notes. the major one though is suicidal ideation or the idea of suicide as smth do be done for the greater good.

Daisy doesn’t like being touched. Daisy keeps watch. Daisy cuts her hair just above her shoulders so it doesn’t brush against them, and then again to her ears so it doesn’t touch her neck. 

“I don’t know how you can deal with this,” she says softly. That teeth bared smile of hers. The fingers of one hand brush through Jon’s curls, root to tip. When they get to the split ends they wrap themselves in the strands, tug lightly. 

“I don’t mind,” he tells her. “Doesn’t bother me.”

Daisy hums. Daisy always hums. From discomfort or in disagreement or along to the songs on her radio. Daisy doesn’t open her mouth to do it. Sometimes she bares her teeth just a bit. Daisy smiles as an act of aggression. 

Daisy brushes her hair off her face. It’s short but the strands by her face keep getting stuck to her cheeks in the light drizzle. Jon’s similarly damp. She doesn’t tell him that it reminds her of the coffin. She doesn’t tell him she keeps thinking someone is touching her. Jon doesn’t ask either. Jon doesn’t know if either of those things are true. He doesn’t Know it about her. 

Soup and sandwiches. Refeeding syndrome. Daisy doesn’t get it because she barely eats. 

“Like a pile of twigs,” she says to Jon. Pokes one thin finger into his chest.

“You’re one to speak,” he tells her, and pokes back. Daisy’s finger, the one against his chest, twitches. 

“Fair enough,” she says. Her hand drops back to her side. Jon’s hand drops to his side as well. 

Jon smiles at her. Daisy smiles back. Lately she’s been smiling as an act of solidarity. It looks awkward on her face. 

–

The bed is plenty big enough for the both of them. Daisy doesn’t sleep. 

Jon hovers around her awkwardly, the question like a slice of citrus in his mouth. 

“Stop pouting,” she says finally. “What is it?”

Daisy makes questions sound like statements. Daisy never actually wants to know. If Daisy wants to know something she tells him. She doesn’t ask. Jon swallows the slice of citrus of a question down without chewing and then scowls lightly at the taste.

“It’s late,” he tells her. 

“So it is.”

Jon closes his mouth. He sits down beside her and gathers his knees in his arms. 

“If you want me to turn off the light just say so,” she says. 

Jon hums. “You can keep it on. But,” he hesitates, “aren’t you going to sleep?”

Daisy looks at him. Teeth covered by her lips. “No,” she says. 

Jon nods. Lies down on his side. “Alright.”

“What?” Daisy says. “That’s it?”

“What else do you want me to say?”

Daisy shrugs. “Tell me to sleep. Give me a lecture about how I’ll die if I don’t sleep.”

“Do you want me to lecture you?”

Daisy looks at him. Eyes dark and narrowed. “No.”

Jon blinks at her. “Then I won’t.”

There’s silence for a little bit. “Are you going to sleep?” she asks. 

“No,” Jon says. 

Doesn’t say _not when me sleeping means other people suffering._ Doesn’t say _it doesn’t feel safe_. The latter almost feels like insulting her. Saying she can’t keep them safe. She can’t – skin and bone, still needs help getting to the kitchen, although she insists on making her own way to the bathroom now – but it feels like it’d be in poor taste to tell her that. 

Daisy doesn’t ask. “Alright,” she says. 

“Alright,” Jon agrees.

–

The weather is wet and humid. It makes Jon’s phantom ribs ache. Daisy still doesn’t know about that. 

Jon wonders – how would you explain it? That he gave away parts of his body for her? To make sure he could claw his way back with her?

Would she be upset? Would she feel guilty? 

Daisy stands in the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror for a long time. Jon watches her do this from the hallway. She knows he’s watching and he knows she knows as well. She doesn’t tell him to stop. Her feet are bare. Her calves are bruised from the pressure of the dirt packed on each side of her for so long. The bruises go all the way up her thighs, he knows. And along her sides and arms. 

“Staring again?” she asks when she finally makes her way back. 

“You know me,” Jon says weakly. 

She smiles at him. Teeth hidden by skin. Skin skin skin. 

–

Would the sun turn him into ash? Flying too close to the sun won’t melt his wings. Ash, then. Rain down on everyone. Already something close enough to the current reality of his situation. Him as ash and everyone else as poor unsuspecting victims trying to breathe through it. 

Daisy doesn’t like to be touched. Jon doesn’t either, these days. If he’s honest he barely remembers what gentle touch feels like. Or touch not meant to hurt him, even. He could Know, but it feels like it’d do more harm than good. Can’t be hurt by the absence by something you can’t remember well enough to miss.

The flat is quiet most days. The telly, when it’s on, is muted. Daisy reads lips when she can. Jon reads the closed captions.

Outside the sun rises and sets. Most days both things happen without them noticing.

Jon makes pasta. Or rice or something with potatoes or bread. Daisy makes soup. It’s the only thing she knows how to make well that isn’t frozen or from a can. Her idea of a nice breakfast is microwaved beans. Sometimes Jon catches her microwaving frozen spinach or peas. She eats them hunched over at the counter, usually in total darkness, like a resource guarding dog. 

Daisy’s hair grows enough to touch her neck again. She shaves the sides herself with Jon’s clippers. He hasn’t used them in years. To be honest he had forgotten they were there in the first place. Daisy doesn’t ask to borrow them. She just does. 

–

“Cop mentality,” Jon says slowly. What it’s in response to isn’t important. Context, sometimes, feels irrelevant. Like everything is just context for the next thing to happen in. He’s tired enough that nothing means anything.

“What mentality is that, then?” she asks him. Or – Daisy doesn’t ask. Daisy tells him things that she pretends are questions for the impact. “The one where you think denying yourself sleep is going to help.”

The unspoken _if you wanted to make any real sacrifice you would already be dead_ is heavy. Daisy doesn’t say it out loud because she knows it would cross a boundary. Because she knows how it would sound. Because she won’t do it either. Won’t do it either. 

“I’m trying to do something right,” he says. Picks at a thread on the duvet cover. 

“Do something else.”

“It’s easy for you to say,” he tells her. “All you have to do is not kill. I hurt people just by existing.”

Daisy looks at him like he’s grown two extra heads. “Easy?”

Jon looks away. One hand goes to his throat without meaning to, and Daisy, watching it, licks her lips. “Don’t do that,” he says quietly. 

“ _You_ don’t do that.”

“Then what _do_ you want me to do?”

Georgie, at least, had the courage to almost tell him that he should have died. Still should die. He thinks about trying to cut off his own fingers. If he went fast enough could he slit his own throat before his body healed up again? You only need to lose two thirds of your blood to die. 

“Just –,” Daisy fumbles, “I don’t know.”

“It’s the only thing I can think of.”

Aside from dying, that is.

Does either of them deserve to live? Daisy walks around the flat with her unsteady feet buckling on the uneven floors like she’s about to collapse. Soup and sandwiches and beans and spinach. It’s been long enough that she should be allowed to eat more food but she doesn’t. Claims it makes her feel sick. 

“Then think of something else.”

–

Basira still half heartedly thinks Daisy’s dead. Daisy also half heartedly thinks she’s dead. 

“Hell, huh,” she says one day. She pokes at her toast with her finger. 

“Pardon?”

She looks at him. Her finger has pushed a dent into the surface of the bread. “Do you think it exists?”

Jon swallows around the scratchy, dry piece of toast already in his mouth. “Why?”

Daisy shrugs. “Just making conversation.”

Jon shrugs as well, and then tilts his head to the side, and then shrugs again. “Does it matter?”

Daisy sighs. “I don’t know,” she admits. 

She doesn’t tell him it’s because sometimes she still thinks about dying for real. Weighs the pros and the cons. The selfish and the selfless. Cop mentality, he thinks, still believing in the carceral system over redemption despite trying to know better. Harshest punishment to fit the worst crimes. 

He doesn’t tell her the reason he doesn’t like to talk about it is because he thinks about it, too. He’d been so scared of what would happen, afterwards, if he hadn’t grasped onto the chance he’d been given and just let himself keep falling. Where would he have found himself? Where would he find himself? 

“Do you want me to Know?” he asks, although he’s not sure he could if he tried to. 

“No,” Daisy says immediately. “I don’t want to know.”

–

Daisy puts her head on his shoulder. 

“Hey,” he says, surprised. 

“Shush,” she grumbles. Her teeth and her throat work together. 

“Okay,” he agrees. She leans against him harder. Heavy and solid.

–

Daisy lives with him but she also doesn’t. She’s in his flat whenever they’re not at work. She’s also not really there most of the time. 

She keeps watch. She focuses on what is outside more than she focuses on existing inside of the flat. 

“What?” Jon asks her. She perches at the big street facing window like a bird and presses her face almost into the glass. Any closer and the tip of her nose will leave a mark. 

“Nothing,” she says, and unfolds her body until she’s mostly human shaped again. In the dim light her eyes don’t have their usual glint. 

“Popcorn?” he asks. He offers her the bowl, and she looks at it like she hadn’t even realized it was there at all. 

“Did you just make this?” she asks. Her hand goes into the bowl and comes back with a fistful of popcorn. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Didn’t you hear it?”

“No,” Daisy says. She looks a little unsettled. “Did you actually?”

Hint of teeth. Like she has half the mind to threaten him for it. 

“Yes,” he tells her. “You were really focused.”

Daisy hums. Doubt floats across her eyes like a little rain cloud. 

“Are you alright?” he asks. 

“Yes,” she insists. Puts one piece of popcorn in her mouth. Swallows it whole without chewing.

–

Jon falls asleep in the bed. When he wakes up Daisy’s sprawled over the other half of the bed, arm hanging off the side of it, fingers almost brushing the floor. His eyes, heavy and tingling with sleep, fall shut again. 

–

Jon cooks. 

“Can I help?” Daisy asks. She tries to sound authoritative. Like her questions aren’t questions at all, or if they are there is a game of some sort in them. 

“That’s alright,” he tells her. “You can sit down.”

Daisy scowls and it bares her teeth. She closes her mouth again. “Something. Come on.”

“Fine,” Jon says. “Slice the lemon.”

She pulls a knife out of the block with a metallic swishing noise. “How thick?”

Jon hums. Turns the chicken breast over in the skillet. “Half an inch.”

Daisy’s knife skills leave much to be desired but she slices the lemon all the same. “Here,” she says when she’s finished. 

“Thank you,” he tells her.

“Don’t condescend me,” she tells him in turn. 

Jon squints and then opens his mouth and then closes it again. No point trying to argue with her. “Okay,” he says. 

–

Daisy’s hair is the first thing he smells when he wakes up. Shampoo and conditioner. It’s only been a bit that she’s felt like conditioning her hair at all. It’s all soft now. 

One of his arms is slung over her waist gently. Daisy doesn’t like to be touched, he remembers. He goes to pull away. Daisy’s hand shoots up to grab his wrist. 

“Stay,” Daisy grumbles through her teeth. Like it causes her great pain. Like she would rather say anything else. Like she’s soft and vulnerable. Clam out of its shell. 

–

And Daisy doesn’t have nightmares like Jon does. 

They’re different. They’re less real. More often than not he’s in them. She tells him he has too many eyes, and that they move across his skin like ants, and he holds her from behind until she feels safe enough to face him again. He blinks his two eyes at her and she looks from one eye to the other and then she looks away again. 

Jon’s nightmares are much more visceral. People crushed under packed dirt. Blood and teeth and puppets. In his dreams Daisy takes him to the woods and slits his throat like an animal and what comes out of him isn’t blood but lotion. Unscented and thick and white. When he wakes up Daisy’s there, sleep-warm and sleep-soft. He looks at her fingernails. She doesn’t sleep with a knife anymore. Doesn’t carry a gun anymore either. 

It’s what he deserved back then. To bleed out in the woods. He wonders, sometimes, if he should’ve let her do it. If he would let her do it now. If he should let her do it. If she would still do it, if he asked her nicely enough. 

–

Daisy kisses him like she’s made mostly of teeth. Like her mouth is the only soft spot in her entire body. 

“Are you sure,” he gasps into her mouth when she does. The second half of the sentence, the bit where he tells her that she probably shouldn’t be, gets lost somewhere between his tongue and his front teeth.

“Do you want me to stop?” she asks. Daisy doesn’t ask but right now she’s asking. 

“No,” Jon says. Daisy kisses him again. Her hand curls around his shoulder. He leans against her and lets himself be kissed. 

–

In bed, before they go to sleep, Daisy straddles his hips carefully and then leans down to cover his body entirely with her own. 

Jon doesn’t say anything. When she’s like this she likes for everything to be very quiet. She’s vulnerable and bare and, despite pretending that she isn’t, she’s scared. 

Mouth to his neck. The first time she did this he was scared she would rip his throat out with her teeth. Or maybe lick a stripe across his neck, along the horizontal, thin scar she’s left there. She kisses over the center and then each end of it. He always wonders why she doesn’t do one end to the other. Pause in the middle. He never asks. 

She doesn’t stay like that for long, but the few minutes she does feel like she’s completely human. Jon wishes he, too, were completely human. 

“I’m not a person,” she tells him dryly over breakfast. 

“Of course you are,” he tells her, but it’s weak. Like they both know the reason he insists is because if she’s not a person he sure as hell isn’t one either.

“Too late for that,” she says. Takes a bite of her bagel. Inch thick layer of cream cheese on it. 

Daisy puts cream cheese in her pasta sauce. Passata and garlic and cream cheese. Salt and pepper and basil and oregano. Jon watches her eat it like she’s starving. He pokes at his takeaway fried rice and watches her eat.

“Do you want a bite?” she asks. Daisy would never offer out her food. Daisy eats like a stray dog finally given access to food again. Jon shakes his head.

“Good,” she tells him, and then smiles wickedly. “Wouldn’t’ve let you have any.”

–

Her bruises healed so slowly he almost got used to her just looking like that permanently. Eventually she’s mostly the color of her skin again. 

“Guess I’m human enough for that,” she says. She puts her feet in Jon’s lap carefully. Jon spreads his legs a little bit to make more room for them. 

“Guess so,” he agrees. He didn’t bruise at all. Maybe he wasn’t there long enough, but he’s also pretty sure that isn’t how bruising works. Maybe he’s not human enough to bruise anymore. 

“Your hair’s gotten so long,” she tells him next. One hand reaches towards him so he leans his head to meet it halfway. Fingernails scratch over the skin of his scalp. “Do you not get hot?”

Jon bites down on his tongue so he doesn’t tell her he doesn’t think it’s the heat that’s the issue with long hair for her. “No,” he says. Daisy nods. When she runs her fingers down the length of his hair, the curls smoothing out and straightening with the pull of them, it takes her several seconds to get to the ends. 

“Split ends,” she mumbles. “You need a trim.”

“Are you offering?”

Daisy smiles a tired smile at him. “Do you trust me with scissors?”

Jon’s mouth twitches at the corners lightly. Settles into a tight smile. “Sure.”

–

She only takes an inch. 

“They spread upwards, y’know,” she tells him. She uses her fingers to brush out the loose hairs, and then her hands to bounce his curls. Get them all fluffy again. They’re damp. Not much to fluff. 

“I know,” he says. “Just haven’t had the time to think about that.”

By time he means it’s hardly been a priority. She knows that too. 

“Well,” she says. “In any case. It’s good again.”

She pulls her hands away from his hair. “Wait,” he says. Daisy stills. 

“What?”

Daisy with the sharp hair cutting scissors. Holding them all wrong in her scarred, broad hands. The tip of the blade pointing outwards. 

“Will you brush it?” he asks. 

Daisy goes quiet for a moment. “Why?”

Jon shrugs, all embarrassment. “You don’t have to.”

He thinks about gentle touch. Something he’d forgotten. Something he thinks about all the time now. Of Daisy folding her hands over his when she wakes up with his arm around her waist. Daisy’s legs or feet in his lap. Daisy’s head on his shoulder. Or his head on her shoulder, now – how she just grabs his head gently, bends his neck until his cheek can rest on her shoulder. She always lets go to let him adjust, move his neck to make it more comfortable. Eventually at least. 

“Sure,” she says. Softer than usual. Her hands, in his hair, holding the wide-tooth comb, are softer than usual as well. 

–

Inside of the flat with the uneven floors and mostly broken central heating Daisy gets steady on her feet again. Jon watches her cheeks round out and flush again. She’s not as strong as she was, at one point, but she’s strong again. Strong enough. Jon, still mostly twigs, feels more like a nest than something living in one. 

“I’ll make dinner,” she tells him one night. Jon raises an eyebrow. 

“Frozen fish fillets and chips it is, then?” he says. The amount of food she can make continues to be mostly limited to various kinds of soups and what she can throw in the oven and forget about. 

“Nothing wrong with fish and chips,” she tells him. She’s already taking the oven tray out of the cupboard. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone vegetarian while I wasn’t looking.”

Jon grumbles just for the sake of it. She shoots him a smile with some spark in it. “Have you?”

“No,” he tells her. 

“Good,” she says, all smug satisfaction.

Jon sits at the dining table and watches her wait for the oven light to turn off. At least she preheats the oven now. Generous sprinkle of chunky chips directly on the stained baking sheet. Four pieces of fish on top of the pile. 

“They’re going to go all soggy,” Jon tells her.

“What do you care?” she asks. She smiles that smile again. Not aggressive. Just teeth. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you eat leftover chips cold from the fridge.”

“That’s different,” he argues. She slides the tray into the oven.

“Disagree,” she says. “And besides, they’re hardly going to be ruined. I’ll give them a toss halfway through, even.”

It’s a fair compromise, Jon supposes. He looks outside through the kitchen window. Daisy comes to sit next to him, feet going up on the window sill. She doesn’t quite knock the dying basil plant off of it, but it’s close. Jon closes his hands around the pot and moves it to the dining table. 

“Did you set a timer?” he asks. 

“No,” she says. 

Jon sighs. Pulls out his own phone. Sets one for sixteen minutes.

“You’re going to turn the chips when it goes off,” he tells her. 

“Mhm,” Daisy hums. She closes her eyes. 

The hair on the sides of her head is growing in again. Little clumps of hair sticking out over the tops of her ears where it can’t grow downwards. He wonders if she’s going to shave it again or if she’s going to let it grow out instead. It used to be so long. To her shoulder blades. Then to her neck. Then to her ears. 

Daisy cracks open one eye. Looks at him. Smiles. Jon smiles back. 

Looks outside, where the wild daisies are in full bloom again.

**Author's Note:**

> cws aside from the suicidal ideation,  
> \- survivor's guilt  
> \- mild self harm (not sleeping) and mentions of canon self harm (cutting off fingers)  
> \- a lot of dwelling on the whole daisy almost slashing jons throat thing   
> \- ptsd


End file.
